Cedar Hill Cemetery Commemorates 150 Years

The final resting place of many prominent Hartford-area citizens, including actress Katharine Hepburn, financier J.P. Morgan and poet Wallace Stevens, is commemorating its 150th anniversary.

"We're very proud that we have been in existence so long and we're still carrying on the original intentions of the founders," Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation Director Beverly Lucas said. "We feel it's a chance to kind of celebrate their fore thinking in developing the cemetery and to highlight that we are still moving forward."

The cemetery will formally mark its sesquicentennial on Saturday, Sept. 13 with a day of costumed dramatizations, musical performances and other events, Lucas said.

Cedar Hill started in 1864 when a group of Hartford citizens decided that their booming Victorian city needed a proper place to bury its dead, Lucas said. In accordance with the feelings of the time, they wanted a cemetery that was for the living as well as the dead, she said.

As a result, Cedar Hill, located in Wethersfield, Hartford and Newington, was and is as much a park as a burial ground. Laid out by Jacob Weidenmann, who also designed Bushnell Park, the cemetery's graves spread out over undulating grounds surrounded by rolling woodland and tranquil ponds.

A century and a half later, the cemetery retains its peaceful, bucolic atmosphere. Visitors drive through 65 acres of woods and past a pond dotted with lily pads before getting to any graves.

"It (the wooded entrance corridor) is so peaceful and restful," Lucas said. "It's where most of our nature is visible. Jacob Weidenmann designed it so you have a nice relaxing entrance rather having the burials right up to the roadway. It brings peace and serenity as you enter."

Cedar Hill fast became the preferred final resting place of the area's elite. Families often disinterred long dead relatives to bury them in the family plot at Cedar Hill, Lucas said. Gun maker Samuel Colt and Horace Wells, a pioneer in the use of anesthesia, are among those whose remains were moved in the cemetery, she said.

Victorians erected elaborate monuments to the dead, and Cedar Hill is full of them.

"It was definitely an opportunity to display your wealth and status," Lucas said.

Among the most elaborate is the grave of Civil War Gen. Griffin A. Steadman, an elaborate granite coffin covered in the flag and listing all the battles he fought in, Lucas said. Also popular is the monument to insurance executive Mark Howard, inventor of the deductible, a towering pink granite pyramid with a statue of an angel at its door.

Katharine Hepburn's is the grave that visitors most often ask to see, Lucas said. The second most asked-for is a surprise: Yung Wing, who graduated from Yale College in 1854 as the first Chinese to receive a degree from an American University, she said. Many Chinese come to view his grave, she said.

In spite of 32,500 internments over 150 years, Cedar Hill still has plenty of space, Executive Superintendent William Griswold said. He estimated that plots would be sold for another 75 years and burials would continue for hundreds of years.

Griswold's father worked for the cemetery and he grew up in a house on the grounds. Like Lucas, he emphasized its park-like atmosphere.

"It's not a scary place," said Griswold, whose son also works at the cemetery. "It's a place to reflect and remember the good times."

Lucas said she hopes visitors appreciate the cemetery's "history and nature and art."

The cemetery offers a wide variety of tours, including about birds, trees and butterflies on the property, Lucas said. For more information, call the foundation at 860-956-3311.